BUSH LEAGUERS

A down-on-its-luck, lowbrow baseball team may find salvation in a talented new player in this graphic novel set in the late 19th century.

Skip and Kingston are two players for the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, a perpetually beaten baseball team owned by swindling businessman Van Der Klam (who sets a poor example of following the law that several of his players duplicate). When Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt shows up to quell a riot at Bridegrooms Field, he threatens to shut the team down if any of the players get out of line. Sadly, Skip doesn’t have anything in his life but the team. When new player Rube Shaw shows up with more talent than the rest of the players combined, Skip hatches a plan to save the Bridegrooms. But then three players run afoul of Roosevelt, only narrowly escaping his wrath. Back at the field, Rube leads the team to victory, and Van Der Klam decides to keep the Bridegrooms playing rather than engineering a stadium “accident” and collecting the insurance money. Unfortunately, Roosevelt is still after the team, and it’s only a matter of time before everything explodes. McKeon and Fletcher craft a humorous story aimed at adult readers (there’s plenty of sexual innuendoes and references to sex workers throughout). The madcap tempo of the story, with the bullying Roosevelt as the bellowing antagonist, works to keep the pages turning quickly. Scammers Skip and Kingston seem unlikely to ever get their just deserts, especially with the honest-to-a-fault Rube as their friend, and readers are likely to cheer their successes despite their irresponsible ways. Still, the satire about how public opinion and the press form policy, rather than ideals of right and wrong, is sometimes a bit on the nose. Reporters’ assertions (“What a scandal!”; “Roosevelt crushes symbol of hope for city’s poor and downtrodden!”; “I can see the headlines now!”) are what ultimately put the Bridegrooms back in the game. The color choices tend toward muted, reinforcing the story’s cyanotype-photography era, and Flood’s art ably captures the absolute mayhem and the off-color remarks and gestures of the engaging characters.

A zany, entertaining tale about a Brooklyn baseball team and Theodore Roosevelt.